Transform

After months of work, Transform is finally out and ready for you to play with. This plugin is very exciting for us for a few reasons. First, it’s the most powerful plugin GSG has ever made. It really became much more than we ever thought it would. It all started as an idea to easily shatter text, and it turned into a fully functional animation tool for any object, text, model, or cloner system you throw at it. Second reason we are excited? This is one of those plugins that has so much potential, we can’t even imagine some of the uses you might come up with for it. In short, we are excited to get in into the artists hands (that’s you!) and see what you make with it. Anyway, check out the videos below and see if Transform is a good fit for the way you work. I will have more tutorials and training coming soon for the Plugin. I really can’t wait to see what you come up with. Happy Rendering!

I have a question, is it possible to have 2 transforms in the one project. I have a chunk transformer and an object as is transformer but for some reason everything in this object goes massive when I select it. Should I be able to use multple transforms as this would kind of essential for a number of projects? Having great fun with the plugin and if you have any ideas how to make objects appear more solid (apart from thickness) please let us know (I guess there are quite a few plugins out there to chop an object up). But again some great work and cool features. 🙂

HI Jeremy, Using more than one Transform is key to a lot of effects. For example, to literally transform from one object to another, use two Transforms. One set to IN and one set to OUT. I will have a tutorial for that coming very soon.

Congratulations Nick! After City Kit this one looks promising as well. I spend hours this week finding a nice way to present stage names in a festival promo video and I ended up using a CSTools Xpresso spring/bounce effect. Nice, but not so spectacular.
I’ve tried several shatter/break apart plugins but none of them very satisfying. Looks like we finally have one with balls! 🙂

I have a question, how would you go about adding dynamics to the chunks that are generated via transform so that they don’t intersect and interact with each other, because if you got that working that would just made this plug-in all the more powerful.

Is it possible for the particles that are falling down to the floor on Collapse mode to have a Dynamic Body tag so they can stay on the “solid” floor instead of going through it? I tried without any success
Thanks!
Joss

will one way i think and its the easy way is to try to make Particle Geometry and put the Particle Group that bin used for the Pieces in the Particle Geometry or whatever you wanna call it! and put Dynamic Body tag on it and done!
if the plugin uses TP this most work!

Excellent job. I am having fun already, I specially like the custom effect and the pre and post effects it had really power to the plugin. What I am missing is the Dynamic part, I mean when you can collapse geometry it should act as rigid body…I hope its an idea for the next release 😉

very cool plugin!
Just got 2 observations:
1) the fact you did not mention a way to avoid intersecting of the pieces puzzles me though…kind of makes one think it wouldn’t work with dynamics.
2) One thing I don’t fancy too much is the poly shape of the chunks… the possibility of a more “thrausi” chunk look in addition would take it to another level, I think.

this was my thought as well with the thrausi comment. Something a bit more natural/organic so you dont see thousands of greyscale style transformations popping up in the next few weeks with the same telltale poly chunks. great product regardless

I used thrausi but if you want the polygon look than take your object and an explosion deformer, group them together and put that group into a fracture object. Now mograph works so use the plain and random effectors to create the look you want. Random(keyframe the strength) plain(keyframe the movement of the falloff)

Relatively easy and nothing was made editable! But its takes 30 min to an hours of tweaking so this plugin makes life easire and you can get more work done

I did it. It works, but it’s a little unstable in the editor view. I added dynamics tags to all the ploys and a colider tag for the floor. So it works with all that plus dynamics. I have a thrausi shattered cube (you don’t see that yet) landing and exploding organic chunks using transform and all the pieces fall on the ground. Link soon, i have to finnish it.

This looks like a fun plugin and it looks like a lot of hard work has gone into it but I’m not a fan of plugins like this. I’m sorry if I sound a little critical but I don’t think things like this do anything to inspire original creativity. Knowing how to use a drop down menu and move a few sliders doesn’t make anyone an original artist no more than knowing how to press the ‘sepia’ button on Instagram makes somebody a good photographer. What I like about the tutorials on this site is that you can learn how and why things do what they do and take that knowledge away to apply to your own original creations. Plugins that do everything for you not only reduce a sophisticated program like Cinema down to a mere toy, but over time everybody starts using them and as such, everybody’s work starts to look the same. Learning how to break up and shatter objects from scratch doesn’t only teach you how to break up and shatter objects, you learn a whole lot more about how Cinema works along the way which you can apply to other projects and you may even discover a new and exiting technique that nobody has thought of before. I’m sorry if my comments sound a little harsh, especially given the amount of work that has obviously gone into this plugin, but I’m very passionate about original thought, ideas and creativity, and I just don’t think plugins like this do very much to inspire people to really push their knowledge forward.

Allways the “time is money” argument.
With plugins like this… clients will say: “hej, i know a dude who can explode 3d text in 1h mintes for 100 dollar.” I’m with Adam. This plugin reminds me of those Text Explode Plugins for Flash 10 years ago. Its fun. Nothing more. But i don’t think its good for the design comunity.

I agree Nick…as with everything else, this is a tool…everyone will use it the same way they currently use everything else…the “real world” (for lack of better term) designers will design amazing things with it, adding their own twist…others will continue making video’s of their call of duty screen shots, but now they can transform em…it’s kind of the ol’ “if everyone was given the same amount of money, eventually all the rich will be rich again and the poor will be poor again” scenario in my opinion…which no one asked for…Just because a person can now more easily “shatter” extruded text doesn’t mean they automatically have the ability to make it look good, or sell it for that matter……

They make it look good by using GreyscaleGorilla’s LightKit Pro and HDRI Studio. Just like everybody else does. I’m certain these plugins kill original creativity rather than inspire it but we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Nice work on this plugin. Its going to be a nice tool to help out on those tight deadlines (and for a bit of playing about).

I’ve spotted a few issues however which I thought I’d flag up for you. I’ve installed the plugin on v12 and it appears quite a few of the effects don’t really work in the way I imagine they are supposed to. To give you an example, I compared your intro movie where you use an ‘explode direction’ effect. I tried this effect and found that it explodes generically then dissolves away, but does not act in the same way you show in your movie. This appears to be the case with quite a few of the effects.

Also, the post effect button does not bring up a new tab allowing for effectors to be applied.

I was just wondering whether these were issues you are aware of. Or simply something I may be missing and doing wrong at my end.

Iv testing with xbreaker (break object, connect and delete) and go very well. It run in Existing Parts too (without connnect and delete) I miss to can apply dynamics to the result parts. It there anyway to do that? In any case, it provides a lot of possibilities. I like it.

Yeah, I’ve had that too…if you add the 1 step fillet and C! it seems like it won’t render on “I’s, E’s, T’s” and I’m sure some others that I haven’t used…also, if you have both an R1 and C1 on the same text, it stops rendering the C1 completely after it is chunked…turn it back to model and it seems fine…

Hi Nick,
Thanks for your awesome plug-in!!!!!!!!! I had a quick question Im having problems when using Transform on a logo .I subdivided it like you say in your transform text tutorial put it in a connect set phong to manual and lowered the phong on my object , im using a scratchy metal texture on cubic projection and whenever i hit refresh i get a lot of texture errors is there any way around this or am missing a step?

As with all of Nick’s work and plugins this is another example that will inspire work and creativity. The “kills creativity” theory only applies to those who wouldn’t have been creative in the first place.

I’ve been using the transform plugin for a couple of days now and I’m trying to figure out if there is a way to make the tracer object trace the paths of the ‘chunks’ as they move. I’m having some trouble but don’t know if its possible using the transform object. Any thoughts on making that work?

Hi Nick !
I’ve trouble with this pluggin : when i’m changing the effect in the “Transition” tab, nothing happen : it’s always the same effect… I clicked “Refresh” but it’s the same… Any idea of what’s going wrong…?

Hey Nick, really like the plugin, bought it in the first 24h 🙂 One question: Would Transform be able to do a kind of polygon unfolding/folding effect. Im sure you know what i mean. The effect where polygons by polygons fold/flip out one after the other. Maybe in the future? I really would love that!

It will not work if you choose to chunk the MODEL in the transform is displayed as “Poly Count Too High”, Is not this only changes the object?
Why do very much in the object polygon data from a large flower with hyperNubs · ·
PC WIN7 coreI7 3.2GHZ
Quadro4000 memory 12GHZ
I have a break but with Japanese translation because Googl

.
Nick i think this is too expensive man and a friend o mine got this plugin for 200 (dont want to say his name ) and we were testing it…And it looks like its a Cinema 4d TP preset loaded in a normal project and is saved as a Cinema4D plugin!! The preset default is located in Cinema4D library and you put a string in python to hide the old interface .
if you Go to Layer, and if you turn on all levels will appear throughout the project exploded. Am sorry man but if we r wrong lets us know . Yes it is very good and handy but dont you think is too expensive????????

does anyone now thinks that 200 is too much ???? ok look am not gona say anything anymore , this is just my opinion , i know nick worked hard for this , but i feel that there are some loopholes in this situation and in this matter, lets just say am not getting this plugin, there are some other plugins like Nitroblast…….. IS just am a little bit disappointed because this plugin is not so clear from where it came from and what is really under the hood.

There are tons of cool plugins to shatter objects for sure. We think that Transform is WAY WAY more than that. Chunk mode is only one of many modes that help animate your scene. I have been using Cloner and Existing Parts a bunch lately. We have huge improvements coming for animating text and cloners. Think of it as an animation tool and not just for shattering. Truthfully, we don’t know what Transform will become, exactly. For now, all we know is that it’s a blast to play with and we hope it helps others make great work.

CHUNKMODE in actual practice is simply an explode object dropped within an instance. Into the instance one references ones parametric obbject – be that either shape, cloner or text – one drops the two inside a fracture object (apply a mograph tag) – drop the lot into a connect referencing the fracture and B’jingo:

However, we think Transform is way WAY more than just making Chunks. Transform takes those chunks, (or clones, or text, or individual objects) and allow you to animate them easily by using our built in effects, or custom mode where you can build your own effect. Think of Transform not as a simple break apart tool, but an entire animation tool that gives you the ability do DO something with those pieces without keyframes and without setting up your own rigs.

Transform isn’t for everyone. No plugin is. But we have put a lot of work into this to make it do complicated effects yet still make it easy and fun to use. I really love it and think others will find it useful in their work, too.

Nick can you please help me? I am using text or squares and it does not break up the object! it just moves around randomnly or comes together or it’s really buggy, the refresh button doesn’t show up in the middle but only in the little boxes in the settings. Please help me I really want to use this plugin it looks amazing.

Nice tut Nick really inspiring, I’ve a problem using transform with text, I don’t know where the problem comes from, but cinema starts to slow when I put the motext under a connect object and transform lags, it’s very stressful, do you know what’s causing it…

Hello Nick !
This is my fourth message without any answer… Why ?
I understand that the very first version can’t be totally efficient, but this one is crashing my C4D every time ! An answer from you would be nice…
I’ve paid a plugin that is not working… 🙁 You can understand i’m a little bit disappointed…

Hi Nick, love Transform!… i’m wondering how to make the broken up pieces, done by Transform, to bounce off the floor,,like an explosion and the chunks land on the ground…i put a collider tag on the ground,,and rigid body tag to the Mograf text…and even tried the rigid body tag on Transform…but the broken up chunks just fall off screen,,they do not bounce on the ground… how can we do that? is there a tutorial that shows how to do that?

From watching this. Is it possible to only do a section of an object. Like say Collapse, you want a building to break but only a section of the building is affected (which is possibly more realistic). Is it possible to do this or does this plugin only affect the whole object?

Would it be really hard to update this plugin to make use of some modynamics? It would be neat to seed an animation with your plugin but instead of the pieces fading away, have them affected at an arbitrary point by modynamics so things could fall back down/bounce/interact with each other. Also, trigger on collision would be great if you wanted an object to affect your transformed pieces on collision and trigger their animation. I guess I don’t do enough hardcore mograph to make use of this as of yet, but if it had dynamics, this would give a great toolset for people who’d like to incorporate your plugin for more realistic sims etc. I’m loving the possibilities here. Nick you are truly awesome. But it seems you probably know that already. 😉

So big Problem when i try to add thickness to the normal ” Text ” type i am able to add only 1 % or 2 % thickness percent and u cant add more than this percent .. as if u add it more than 2 % thickness u will note that thickness will start to get over your text … even when u apply weld option in chunk mode u still see some over polygons … is there are any solution for that !!!

Thickness only works perfect with cubes and street lines .. and with curves it start to make polygons over your object or text ..

I’m in a bit of a pickle at the moment. I’ve created a frame via curves and cloned cubes around using the spline effector. I then added the transform plugin with the cloner mode and all the necessary effects and it looks great. Btw the spline effector is plugged into the post effectors window. Everything works until I start rendering. The cubes just pops on and there’s no transformation in between. The preview looks great but it wouldn’t render at all. It just pops on. Please advise.

Arrr! Help please!
Loving TRANSFORM on small projects but hit a stumbling block.
I’m trying to use TRANSFORM to transition between two quotes.
1st quote – 3 lines long – 14 words
2nd quote – 4 lines long – 18 words
The problem I’m getting is CHUNK COUNT TOO HIGH
That’s with a subdivision of 2 and for immediate points >uniform>2
Using a 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7 8gb memory
All help would be very gratefully received!!
Thank you!

Hi Guys, just made a composite of a 3D can sitting on a table in a photograph. Everything looks how it should apart from the shadows are being projected past the table into thin air! The can is sitting on a plane with a compositing tag attached. Any ideas??? Thanks in advance, Paul

Hello. The plugin breaks my texture. I looked through all the lessons on the plugin on your site, played with all the settings, but nothing helps. I can send a screenshot with all the settings that can help you with a solution to my problem.
Here are two links to images “with” and “without” plugin.
Thank you!

Great plug in Nick ! but unfortunately I am a victim of not learning this properly. I have a good configuration with 24 gb ram, 8 mb cache of processor , 3rd generation motherboard and 2gb gpu. I was working with GSG Transform and put it on a high poly text. when i was playing with the high parameters my pc was choking. but i was mesmerized by the greatness of fracture. i didn’t stop. suddenly my pc shutdown directly without blue screen. it responded to frequent restart. yet i can’t do work with that pc because the pc restarts now and then and gradually it restarts frequently within seconds. i checked that it’s not a problem of windows. Can i know ,if it’s not your business policy, that which parts the GSG Transform use while breaking the polygons in a massive count and transforming those In and Out, using effects like chunk? can you give me an idea that which part can go wrong with an overdose. is it processor or mainboard or gpu. I used C4D about 4 months. I rendered files that took 10 hours at a stretch using the CPU 100 % continuously but never shut.